Flagrate
by ilovemoony73
Summary: Alone for the day at Grimmauld Place, Alice isn't happy when she becomes stuck with Lily inside an unknown passageway.


Written for Yellowtail555's Secret Passageway Competition. My Prompts were Gryffindor pride, unanswered questions and a fever. JKR owns all.

"Alice, stop sulking and help me find my wand!" No answer. Lily continued to feel across the dirt floor. "We'll never get out of here if we don't find it," Lily said in a sing-song tone.

Alice gave a sigh and knelt on the ground. Rolling her eyes in exasperation, she began to pat around the ground as well. "Are you sure you even had it on you?" Irritation rang clear in her voice. Though she was hesitant to admit, Alice was glad Lily had happened to have her wand on her; yet she was baffled as to why: How could she possibly think she would require her wand when they were the only two in the dank, dusty old house?

Most members of the Order of the Phoenix were currently doing something _useful: _some were going about their daily routines at work and trying to avoid conversations of what they would be doing over the weekend, how they were going to spend the upcoming Christmas holiday, where they were going today after quitting hour; others were doing specific work for the Order which they had begun to refer to among themselves as "missions;" even though most were hardly that, it made surveillance shifts and similarly boring and time-consuming activities more exciting to look forward to. A few members, such as Lily and Alice's husbands', were actively and openly fighting dark magic; however this was their career, as both were Aurors. They had left very early that morning on a raid and at little past noon no word on their progress had been heard.

Alice would have been with Frank and James, had she not been dreadfully sick. The three had just recently finished their training and she would have given anything to be part of the raid, but Frank absolutely refused: she mustn't leave Grimmauld Place until she was better. _I can't get better if I'm stuck in this house with _her, Alice had thought bitterly, but instead of sharing she gave Frank a kiss and wished him luck.

Alice's misery could barely hold a candle to Lily's, the redhead believed. Alice had been sick a mere two days, while Lily had fallen ill over a week ago. Lily knew that there were a ton of things that could be worse, especially in today's world, but she wanted to be _helping,_ she didn't want to be sitting in the smelly manor for days on end. She had stayed in her and James' room all morning, not leaving until half of an hour after he had been gone, only to shower and use the bathroom. Then she had returned to bed and curled under the covers, reading a book she had borrowed from Remus, surrounded by the bright morning light pouring in through the (very recently) opened windows. At a quarter of noon, Lily decided she was hungry. She dressed in lazy jeans and a tee shirt, pocketed her wand and left to descend the several cases of stairs before the basement kitchen.

When Lily entered the kitchen, Alice closed her eyes and took a deep breath quickly. _She _had gotten her sick and made her miss out on what could have become the most exciting raid of her career. On top of everything _she_ had already done. _Miss_ Perfect Gryffindor. _Queen_ Head Girl. _Lady_ Lily Evans. She made Alice feel sick.

Once the two had been friends, but the previous year and been their seventh at Hogwarts, and after Sirius told her that _secret_ of Lily's, Alice hadn't been able to look at Lily without thinking unkind thoughts.

And now the two were trapped in this dark, musty hall together. Lily figured it had to be a kind of passageway, like the kind James had taken her through at Hogwarts, based on the feel of the dirt floor and stone walls and the smell of the thick air. Alice didn't _care_ where they were; she wanted out.

"I'm absolutely positive. I always have my wand on me. 'Constant vigilance' and all that,"She said, in the words of Alastor "Mad-Eye" Moody.

"Maybe you dropped it when I . . . In the kitchen?" After having a minute to calm, Alice felt ashamed of herself for acting so rudely, no matter whom she had been acting toward. Never in her life had she done anything as she had done just minutes ago.

Alice had stood at the counter, eating porridge when Lily came in. She walked around the counter and stood leaning against the table, a meters or two to the left of the stone fireplace. "Good morning," Lily had said brightly and quite nasally.

"'Morning," Alice replied curtly, sounding equally nasal. Lily's bare feet made dull padding sounds as she crossed the stone floor. At the counter, she took an apple from the fruit basket and poured herself juice from the large pitcher sitting there from breakfast. Alice thought, relieved, that Lily was going to leave as quickly as she had come as she turned around and walked back in the direction of the door, when she stopped right in front of Alice, placing her glass of juice on the mantle of the fireplace.

"How are you feeling?" Lily asked kindly, taking a bite of her apple. Alice disliked her for being so nice; it made it hard for her to feel angry at the taller girl.

"Worse. And you?" Alice put her empty bowl on the table behind her and looked at Lily, her arms crossed.

"I'm sorry to hear that; I'm feeling better myself, I hope you feel better as fast as I," she replied, her wide doe-eyes moving away from Alice for bites of her apple. Alice nodded her thanks.

After a minute, Lily finished her apple and stood, sipping her juice. Beginning to feel awkward in the silence, she spoke. "Err, Alice, we're friends, right? I mean, nothing has ever happened to cause anything otherwi—" Lily's ignorance of how she had betrayed Alice pushed her, momentarily, over her edge. She was cranky, her head hurt, as did her stomach, she wanted nothing but to sleep and see Frank. But she wasn't able to control herself as her anger rocketed and exploded inside of her. She pushed forward, all of her weight and momentum behind her, and touching Lily's thin shoulders, shoved her right into—no, not into, _through—_pushed her _through_ the wall of the kitchen.

They continued to fumble through the dark in search of Lily's wand. "A-ha!" Lily exclaimed. "_Lumos."_ Alice could see her pale, ill-looking face. "Now," Lily marveled, "Where _are_ we?" she pushed against the stones of the wall. "It's a kind of tunnel," she said, her voice full of awe.

The two girls had noticed before how big Grimmauld Place was, but they hadn't thought it would have magically hidden secrets such as these—tunnels and passageways. Alice tried to push against the wall they had fallen through, but it was solid. "Hullo?" She called. "Can anyone hear me?"

"No one's in the house," Lily said, sounding a tad upset. "Let's follow it this way, see if it lets out into anyone's room." She turned without waiting for a reply from Alice and started up the dark passage. She stopped after only a few meters, looking straight ahead, then to her right, then back again. Alice caught up and saw that the hall split and stood with Lily, wondering which way they were supposed to follow.

Lily spoke, surprising Alice: "Why did you push me, exactly?" She sounded hurt, and Alice felt her shame sink deeper. "Come on, don't keep secrets; don't keep me in the dark—no pun intended—answer the question, please? I'd like to know." She seemed hurt, yes, but she still sounded like the happy-go-lucky Lily she always seemed to be . . . when she wasn't telling people off. Alice didn't answer.

"Maybe we can use _Flagrate_ to mark our path, so if we have to turn we know where we have been," Alice mused aloud. Lily turned to her and grinned.

"Yes, that's exactly what we'll do! If we mark only the wall on one side of us, we'll be able to tell if we go in the same direction more than once. _Flagrate,_" Lily spoke the incantation, holding the tip of her wand to the middle of the wall on their right. Without deciding out loud, they turned the corner to the right, Lily marking the turn, and continued on.

Doing their best not to get lost, they continued down the hall for what felt like forever. Many turns seemed to lead back to places they had been, though there was always another option. After many turns in the wrong direction, Alice and Lily came to an intersection with no marks on the walls.

Lily sighed. "Which way, do you suppose?" Alice shrugged.

"How about we just try forward?" They continued straight and Lily marked the walls with her wand as they went. They remained silent until Lily's curiosity spiked again.

"Alice," Lily started, making the short-haired girl jump. "Sorry. Uh, do you think you could tell me why you shoved me back in the kitchen now?" The hurt in Lily's voice made Alice feel guiltier than before. She supposed having to rely on Lily while they were lost in these tunnels helped her conscience encourage her to forget about the past. She felt truly bad for what she did.

"Last year, you and I had all the same classes, as did Frank and James," Alice said, and Lily nodded, indicating to continue. "Professor Slughorn had you and Frank partner for Potions because you and he were always his favorites . . . And well, one day towards the end of the term, you two had to stay after to help Slughorn prepare his lesson with the Third Years, and Sirius had lagged behind everyone else a bit and . . . He caught up to me after class and told me that you kissed Frank," Alice said, sounding more hurt than Lily just had.

"Sirius said that I what?" Lily said, flabbergasted. "I would never . . . You're my friend, one of my closest! Sirius . . . That—That interfering, insensitive little prick!" Lily stammered. "That's why you'd been acting that way so long?" Alice nodded, her head hanging a little. "Alice, you had to have known that wasn't true; you know I would never do such a thing, and you most certainly know Frank would never, and you certainly know that everything—"

"That everything Sirius says is misleading. At least," she said with a trace a humor in her voice. "Yes, I suppose I knew that. But I didn't want to say anything, I didn't want you to think me insecure and I definitely didn't want Frank to think I was turning into one of those obsessive, paranoid girlfriends."

"Gryffindor Pride," Lily said, understanding that Alice wanted to be respected, not thought less of for doubting her boyfriend and friend. "Well, now you know that's not a true story?" Alice nodded. "Okay. Let's get out of here." She turned to continue walking.

"Err. . . Lily?" She stopped and looked at Alice with a questioning expression. She gave her an awkward kind of hug. "Thanks for being such a great friend, even when I wasn't." Lily hugged her back.

"You're burning up," Lily said suddenly. "How long have you had a fever? I haven't had one yet."

"That's odd," Alice said, "Are you sure? Your back feels fifty degrees above normal, Lily."

"Maybe it's all this damp air. Come on, I can't wait to take a good breath." Lily placed a hand on the wall in front of them, a dead-end, and pushed. A crack of light sliced through the dark and Alice pushed too.

After much strain, the two ill girls got the stone wall to slide out, to the left, tucked in between the stone walls of the passage way and the boards-and-wallpaper walls of Grimmauld Place. The two of them stood with their hands on their knees, catching their breath.

"Bullocks! I didn't know that passage was still open!" The girls looked up in time to see Sirius scamper out the door of Grimmauld Place's study.

Lily and Alice looked at each other and shrugged. They walked back down to the kitchen to get hot tea and perhaps some lunch to help improve their ills.

Their questions would go unanswered for today.


End file.
